#he was the same age percy was in sea of monsters. SOM!!! what the hell

[joysmercer]

do you ever think about the fact that nico is barely even a teenager in hoo.

[m4gp13]

I think one of the things that made HOO a less fun read for me was the big difference with how the mesh between mythological and modern was handled because it was one of PJO's biggest selling points (at least for me).

One of my favourite tropes in books is seeing how the fantastical relates to everyday life or adapt to everyday life. Things like Chiron, maker of heroes, doing his thing at a summer camp, The lotus flowers beds becoming a casino, Mt Olympus being on the Empire States building.

Not only did this make the series just generally enjoying to read, it also made for a very interesting juxtaposition with the titans and the difference between them and the demigods. In the first two books, the heroes went to a summer camp for monster fighting and the bad guys ran around in magic doughnut shops and cruise ships. Then the titans start to get really involved in the narrative and we get things like underground arena fights and an obsidian palace/fortress on a mountain.

The goal of the titans is to usher in a new Golden Age, they want the Good Old Days back, so this is visually portrayed with their stricter adherence to the myths and their older architecture. Luke appears to be fully in control of the titan army when we see him in SoM but in TTC he's taking orders from the bigger guy and in TTC we also start to see this stricter adherence and more ancient visual style. When Luke fully looses power to Kronos he's laying in a gold sarcophagus in a massive palace complex on a mountain.

The gods on the other hand have adapted to the times. They send their kids to summer camp and go to work in pinstriped suits. And they're the ones that come out on top. The whole series takes place in the very modern America where the only people who haven't got the memo are the bad guys who essentially want to turn back time to when they were the ones in charge.

Contrast this with HOO, the first two books largely took place in North America but after that little tussle in NR they mostly spend their time in hell or Europe. There's also a lot less creativity when it comes to adapting myths for modern times. Heracles is literally just standing on a tropical island in the middle of the sea. Their fight with the Golden Boy pirate just takes place on some grassy stump of an island after he almost shoots Frank. And doesn't that wind god just straight up live in an ice palace?

Most of HOO takes place on a flying replica of an ancient trireme or in old ruins. They even go to literal Tartarus and it's just a barren waste of bad guys and hazards.

I think it was better in the first two books when Minos lived in a lakeside mansion and that whole thing with the Harpies trying to steal that guys lunch but then you have things like New Rome which make me unreasonably mad. They're literally just a boot camp with a city attached. And not like a modern boot camp to highlight the mix between modern an ancient they are literally just an ancient Roman military camp with a shiny modern city hanging off the back. They wear togas!

Of course, there are the small things like the purple T-shirts or Octavian switching out animals with stuffed toys but the overall effect is still the same. War games instead of capture the flag and tens years or required service for a few decades of peace that you might not even get to reach. I understand Rick wanted to highlight how staunch and traditional the Romans are and he managed to that but at the cost of their likability. After reading PJO I understood that the heroes were the ones who adapted with the times and don't have the Old Republican obsession with the past and the bad guys were too stubborn to move on. All that pre-existing tuning plus the much harsher attitude of New Rome in general presented them in a very antagonistic light.

HOO tries too hard to follow the aesthetic rules of the ancient world it's parodying when breaking those rules is what made PJO such an interesting read in the first place. Think Percy having a pen that turns into a sword in PJO compared to Jason having an imperial coin flip weapon that breaks at the end of book one of HOO.